We’re going to have some fun today.
I want you to rank, in order of importance, these three screenwriting categories.
Plot
Character
Concept
Tell me which of them you believe is most important to a screenplay’s success. Then rank the other two in order of importance. There ARE right and wrong answers here so don’t screw up. You’re being graded.
Okay, do you have your final answer? Go ahead and display it to the class in the comments. Yes, BEFORE I tell you what the correct order is, go down and leave your order in the comments. Just like any good screenplay, we have to up the stakes. We do that by having you risk public shaming for being wrong. :)
Now before I give you the answer, I want you to either mentally of physically write down ten of your favorite movies. It doesn’t have to be your FAVORITE TEN OF ALL TIME. Just ten movies you liked a lot. Now, what’s the very first thing that comes to mind when you think of any of these movies? Cause I’m willing to bet that in every single case, it’s the characters.
When I think of The Matrix, I think of Neo.
When I think of Die Hard, I think of John McClane.
Shawshank, Red and Andy.
Nightcrawler, Louis Bloom.
Aliens, Ripley
Deadpool, Wade Wilson
The Martian, Mark Watney
Guardians of the Galaxy, Peter Quill (and Rocket, and Groot)
So the top spot on your list should be CHARACTER. Character character character. Character trumps everything. If you get the character part right, nothing else in the script needs to be great. How do I know this? Because you can name plenty of movies with weak concepts or weak plots that you still liked because of the characters.
Swingers, great characters bad plot. Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, strong characters janky plot. The Wrestler, great character weak plot. Yes, even the juggernaut that was The Joker, strong main character, forgettable plot.
But you’d be hard-pressed to think of any movies where you didn’t like the characters but you still liked the movie. I can think of a couple I guess. Mad Max Fury Road. I didn’t dislike those characters but they weren’t memorable to me in any way. The Thin Red Line. I love the feel of that movie but I don’t know a single character’s name. Dunkirk to a certain extent. But it’s rare. You’re more likely to fall in love with a character than a plot.
Let me share with you my most recent experience with how important characters are. I have been OBSESSED with the concept for the show, “Beforiegners” ever since I saw the trailer last year. Beforiegners is set in Oslo and follows a strange phenomenon where a bunch of Vikings from 500 years ago begin inexplicably showing up in modern day. We then follow what happens when these inadvertent travelers are forced to integrate into society. I absolutely love this concept. I’ve been impatiently waiting for it to come out on HBO but I was lucky to get my hands on some episodes ahead of time. I’m telling you, I can’t convey enough how excited I was to sit down and watch this.
And it was a total effing bore.
Why was it bore?
Because the characters were lame as hell. The two main characters, one a male cop, the other a female viking who’s become his partner, are beyond boring. They’re both quiet. They’re both methodical. They approach their job in the same way. There’s zero contrast. Zero conflict. But, worst of all, neither of them have any personality. Which killed the show. And it wasn’t the actors faults. It was 100% the writing. They never sat down and tried to create two great characters.
We’ll get back to character in a bit.
But now that we’ve established our top dog, we need to figure out who gets the red ribbon, concept or plot.
My answer might surprise you. But I’m going to say concept. And I know that sounds crazy to some of you because concept is just one overall idea whereas plot is something you meticulously work out over numerous rewrites until everything in your story is woven together in the most entertaining and harmonious way.
But here’s the little secret about concepts. They inform everything about the plot. Let me give you an example. Back to the Future is probably my favorite movie of all time. But for a moment, I want you to imagine if there’s no time travel in Back to the Future. Instead, it’s a high school teen comedy set in modern day called “The Power of Love.” It’s about Marty trying to make it as a singer in a band. Think about how much you just limited your plot. You’ve taken out the opportunity to do so many of the cool things that Back to the Future did. And it’s because you now have a much weaker concept.
Using that logic, you’re always going to have a hard time plotting screenplays with weak concepts. It can be done, of course. Mean Girls was a teen high school comedy and a lot of people liked that movie. But having a good concept is like showing up to a race with a jetpack. It’s going to make things so much easier for you.
None of this is to say that plot doesn’t matter. Even if you have a great concept like Back to the Future, you still have to come up with the plot ideas that elevate that concept, that make the read exciting. Remember that, originally, the time machine in Back to the Future was a refrigerator. That severely limited the time travel plot points of the movie. Once they switched it to a car, however, all sorts of great plot ideas emerged. You will slave away to get your plot right. But I still think it sits behind both character and concept.
So that means we have our order.
1 – Character
2 – Concept
3 – Plot
What does this mean for you, the screenwriter? It means you have to put a lot more thought into your 2-3 main characters. They will be the most critical components to making your script work. And here are some things to consider – things that weak writers overlook.
First and foremost, you must think of your character as their own story, independent of the story in your movie. To understand this best, think of all the challenges and failures and successes and highs and lows you’ve had in your own life. That’s YOUR STORY. You need to give your characters that story as well or else they’ll never pop off the page.
The more you know about your character’s story, the stronger the character will be. Your character story should be divided into two parts. The story that led up to the beginning of the movie, aka the ‘backstory,’ and then the story of your character DURING the movie.
Let’s use the most famous action character ever, John McClane, as an example. He became a New York cop. He married this woman. She got a job opportunity in another city. He hoped she’d fail and come home. Instead she succeeded, which means now their marriage is on the rocks. And I’m sure the writer knew 100 times as much about John McClane as we’re told in the movie. That’s your backstory. And it’s where strong writers separate themselves because they’re willing to do the deep dive into how the character became the person they are even though 99% of that won’t directly show up on the screen.
Once the movie starts, you’re talking about a new character story, a story all of us get to see. You will draw from all the things that happened in the backstory to create the most entertaining John McClane story for the movie. If you realized McClane grew up as a wise-ass who challenged authority in his backstory, you now get to feature that in this story. But if you never did the work and figured that out, it won’t be there in the character. Even if you say to yourself, “This character is going be a wise-ass who challenges authority” but you don’t know how he became that person? Or what led up to that? Then the wise-assery is going to feel cliched.
I don’t think a lot of you realize how important this is. If you want a character to feel authentic, you need to figure out why they became the way they are. The more specific, the better. For example, maybe when John McClane was a young New York cop, he watched as, time and time again, him and his fellow officers were being put into dangerous situations by their Captain, some of which ended in friends of his dying. McClane knew that if he didn’t speak up, nothing would change. He HAD to challenge authority or he’d lose more friends. Once you’re able to ground your character’s identity in real events that you know the specifics of, I guarantee you your characters will come off as more authentic.
A few other things. You want to find character personalities that audiences either like or, if the characters are reserved, that we understand and sympathize with why they’re that way. In that Beforeigners show, they didn’t have either. They were boring people and there wasn’t a lot to sympathize with. You should also have a curiosity about human psychology. In order to get into why we are the way we are, you need to understand how we tick. A person isn’t just a drug addict. Their addiction is their way of coping with something. Find out what that something is. And, finally, you should be fascinated by interpersonal social dynamics – the way human beings interact with each other. Why people are mean to others, why they’re nice, why they’re guarded, why they’re happy.
I read this story recently about this woman who yelled at a random man for not wearing a mask. If you think that this woman is yelling at this man specifically, you don’t understand social dynamics. She doesn’t know this man. She’s spent the last 20, 40, 60 days bottling up her anger at people who don’t wear masks. This man merely represents everyone who’s not wearing a mask in her eyes. To tell him to wear a mask is to tell everyone to wear a mask. That’s what you have to realize about human interaction. It’s rarely about what’s happening on the surface. There’s always something going on underneath and you should have a curiosity as to what that underneath stuff is.
Finally, just to be clear, the ideal situation is that character, concept, and plot are effortlessly woven together so that each one depends on the other equally. You can’t imagine the characters without the concept and you can’t imagine the concept without the plot and you can’t imagine the plot without the characters. That’s the goal. If you’ve done it right, everything is so immaculately connected that it’s all one living breathing organism known as your story.
But just because I like a little controversy, I’ll finish with this: Pay a litttttllllllllleeee extra attention to characters above everything else.
:)
